The Maharajah’s mother was an opium user

cold steel’, in the form of British Bayonets, was the answer to every hostile situation. He went into battle in a long white coat with a cone-shaped turban on his head. One of his officers described him as brave as a lion but with little common sense. in the first battle of the Anglo-Sikh war, just before Christmas 1845, he marched his men into the teeth of the Sikh artillery, lost nearly 1,000 but came out just on top.

His aggression and seeming disregard for loss of life persuaded the Sikh generals to disappear behind earthworks and fight a purely defensive war, hoping to wear the enemy down.

They had not allowed for Gough’s pig-headedness. He sent in attack after attack against dug-in cannons, racking up casualties like never before in the campaign to conquer India.

One regiment alone lost 260 redcoated soldiers in just ten minutes, and for a while it looked as if an unheard-of defeat was on the cards. The presumption of British invincibility, on which many of the military and political successes in India had been built, was suddenly in doubt.

A British general recorded a sense of ‘gloom and foreboding. Perhaps never in the annals of warfare has the British Army on so large a scale been nearer to annihilation’.

But the next day, after a night spent sleeping outside in the bitter cold of winter, four battalions marched towards the Sikh guns, flags flying and as compact and disciplined as if they were on the parade ground back in Delhi or Calcutta. The enemy ran.

The British marched on farther into the Punjab, fighting ‘like devils’. A lieutenant recalled how the enemy’s cannonballs ‘mowed down our ranks. A nine-pound shot severed a man’s head from his body three yards from me’. But the advance continued.

‘Then the lancers were ordered to charge the enemies, which they did most splendidly, rushing smack through them and, wheeling round, charged back again, cutting them to pieces in hundreds.’

Though clearly defeated on that day, the Sikhs did not surrender. ‘A thousand of them concealed themselves in rocks and rushed out at us, discharging their muskets. Our men rushed on them with bayonets, killing them hand to hand.’

In a series of brutal exchanges of shells, grapeshot and musket balls, 2,000 more British soldiers went down but the Sikhs lost 10,000, a third of their strength.

Finally, Gough led the British into Lahore to the strains of See The Conquering Hero Comes from the band, displaying a procession of hundreds of captured Sikh cannons to stress who had won.

Tribute was exacted f rom the defeated nation in land and cash. But there the takeover stopped. The people were deemed ‘patient and submissive’, and the little king and his mother were allowed to continue as rulers for a time, with a British Resident to advise them.

For two to three years, an uneasy peace reigned in the Punjab.

But beneath the surface there was unrest, encouraged by the Maharini. By this point she was theoretically in exile, but she could still stir up trouble. Dissidents and mutineers from what was left of the Sikh army began to collect in the city of Multan, around a leader named Dewan Mulraj.

Two British lieutenants sent to put him in his place had their heads hacked off and sent back to Lahore. A full-scale revolt against British rule was soon under way, fuelled by warlike people such as the Pathans.

The British dithered, uncertain how to proceed at the height of summer when heat exhaustion could take a terrible toll on soldiers unused to such fierce conditions.

A hastily assembled army descended on Multan, besieged it for a few weeks and then withdrew, prompting more Punjabis to join the revolt. The area’s Muslim minority were urged to join an anti-British jihad.

Not until the summer heat cooled and winter approached did the British stir themselves into action. ‘The Sikh nation has called for war,’ declared Lord Dalhousie, recently installed as Governor- General of India, with typical Victorian gusto, ‘and, on my word, sirs, they shall have it — and with a vengeance!’

A massive punitive expedition set out. Multan was besieged again, and at the beginning of 1849 British and Indian troops captured the city. No quarter was given in the bloody handto-hand fighting.

Women and children were slaughtered, houses ransacked and temples pillaged. One soldier recorded how rings and chains were ripped from the living as well as the dead.

Officers joined in the plundering alongside their men. A captain wrote home without a qualm of conscience that loot worth 2.5 million rupees had already been seized and they were now digging for buried treasure.

Meanwhile, the main British force was moving towards Lahore with Tipperary Joe in command again, despite misgivings back in London about the cost of his campaigns in soldiers’ lives.

His tactics were as reckless as before — ‘ bull- at- a- gate’, as one commentator put it. He advanced one regiment headlong into artillery fire at Chillianwala and saw half of them fall. The survivors fled back two miles. Regimental colours were lost, a particular disgrace.

Seeing British soldiers run, two locally recruited sepoy battalions did the same. Once again, Gough’s actions raised questions about